Well, hello everyone! Some of you like the new comment system and its new features. Some of you hate it. And some of you are just trying to make it work correctly.

For those of you that hate it, let me explain why it was done and why it probably aligns with your goals. I’ve learned that blogging is hard if you don’t have an immense amount of time to devote to it, or you inherently just love writing. I love the Atlanta Braves; I like writing. And I have some time to devote to helping what I consider to be the best place to talk Braves ball on the entire internet. And even though we don’t have the resources of Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, or a blog network that drives thousands of people to the site a day, we have a lot of you. I would speculate we have far and away more unique hits to this site a day than any other independent Braves blog on the internet. And that’s because of you, and that is appreciated. And you come here because it’s a nice little dive bar. You come here because it’s not Dave and Busters. It’s not loud and chaotic and full of crazy people. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s full of pretty smart Atlanta Braves fans, and not the riff raff that you see in the more popular environments. I’m not trying to make this Dave and Busters, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to. But I do want to keep the site reasonably current with technology, especially as it’s one of the few controllable things I have to try to make people enjoy the site a little more, and fill the place up a little bit. I do want it to be a little dive bar, but sometimes the place is like that really quiet restaurant where only one person comes in for lunch and two on the weekends. I think the site can scale without becoming Dave and Busters, and there’s a variety of ways I’m trying to do that, like improving the technology.

At any rate, if you’re having problems with it, you can email me at bravesjournalrob at gmail dot com, or I can give you some information here.

-You’ll need to login with a social media account, or you can create an account through Disqus, the comment system creator. When you begin typing into the comment field, it should come up with a very easy way to create an account below where you simply type in your name, email, and password, and then it sends you an email for you to respond to to verify your email address.
-You can use your social media accounts, but the default is that it will show your profile picture. You can turn this off by doing the following:

  • Click your picture
  • A side window will open up. Click your picture again.
  • It will take you to another page where you click a gear in the top right. Click the gear.
  • Click “Edit Profile”
  • Next to “Avatar”, click the dropdown menu and choose “Default”. That will grey out your picture

Going forward, here are some notes about the new comment system:

-You can reply directly to comments, which can allow conversations to flow better

-You can simply make a new comment like before.

-You can sort comments by “best” and by oldest or newest first. I would personally recommend newest even though that’s different from before since you won’t have to scroll to the bottom of the page to be able to comment or see the most recent comments.

-“Best” is influenced the amount of upvotes and downvotes? What is that? It’s a popular way commenting is down on the internet now where you can give a vote of confidence or a vote of admonishment to a comment. So if you’re looking to just read the comments that have been considered to be the best or most helpful, you can sort by “best”. If a comment gets repeatedly downvoted, it will go towards the bottom of the page.

-Don’t downvote people just because you don’t agree with them. If it’s “trolling” in nature, sure, downvote it. If it violates our standard of communication or is inflammatory in any way, feel free to downvote it. But don’t downvote someone because they think Andruw Jones is not deserving of the Hall of Fame or because they think Bobby Cox was not a good in-game manager and you disagree.

-The HTML buttons allow you to more easily add emphasis to your comments instead of having to manually put in the tags.

-Simply copying a YouTube or Twitter URL will cause it to embed properly in the comment. Previously, Twitter embeds would sometimes not load properly, and we were unable to make YouTube videos not take up the entire screen and screw up the entire thread.

-As far as I can tell, there’s no time limit for being able to edit. Previously it was 5 minutes. I don’t currently have any plans of putting a time limit on, but that may change.